In emergency response situations, including reactions to large-scale natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and similar events, it not uncommon that temporary shelter and sleeping arrangements need to be provided for a large number of persons. These temporarily housed persons may be residents affected or displaced by the events or the personnel mobilized to respond to the event. In such temporary shelter arrangements, it may be easier to find a place for a person to sleep but more difficult to provide this person with a desired array of bedding material to sleep in.
While such bedding may be stockpiled, these items may commonly be fairly bulky, taking an undesirably large amount of storage space. In addition, if multiple bedding items are being provided to each person, coordination of storage and distribution of the different items may pose logistical challenges. Once the bedding has been used, collection of the used material, cleaning and processing the bedding for future use may also be logistically difficult. It may be particularly difficult to repackage factory-prepared and packaged bedding into compact forms for storage.
Improvements to current temporary bedding solutions are desirable.
If a displaced person or a responder needs to move from one temporary housing location to another, it may also be desirable that the bedding material they are provided with may be conveniently recompacted for transportation and reuse by the individual.